1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and a toner manufacturing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an image forming apparatus, among the cost of copying and printing, the rate occupied by toner is very high. Therefore, to reduce the cost, it is desirable to reduce the toner quantity adhered to a sheet to form an image. Therefore, conventionally, there is an image forming apparatus using toner having a toner save function for reducing the toner quantity to be consumed.
As a toner quantity reducing method when using the toner save function, for example, as described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 11-308450, there are a method for reducing the toner consumption quantity by reducing the number of printed dots by a method for thinning out the main scanning lines, that is, performing a thinning process every several dots in the overall image area and a method for reducing the toner quantity of each pixel available.
However, the toner save function by the conventional thinning process does not take the image quality into account. Among the toner components, the one contributing most to the image density is a pigment. When the toner consumption quantity is reduced, the pigment quantity per image unit area is reduced, so that the image density is lowered, thus a problem arises that a satisfactory image cannot be obtained.